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Chris McCann

👋 Welcome to my personal page. My name is Chris McCann and I’m a venture capitalist living in the SF Bay Area.

Links

Race Capital, Twitter, LinkedIn, Newsletter, Photography

Work

I’m one of the partners and co-founders of Race Capital, a venture capital firm based in Silicon Valley along with Alfred Chuang and Edith Yeung.

Race Capital is an early stage VC fund that leads primarily seed stage companies, typically with a first check of $1M-$4M. We’ve been an early seed investors in Databricks, Solana, Lightning Labs, Zeet, Opaque Systems, Sematic, and many other great companies.

We focus on all things infrastructure including: data infrastructure, developer tools, open source, transaction systems, payment infrastructure, ML/AI infrastructure, and and generally anything in the lower level technical infrastructure layers of the stack (API’s, transaction systems, embedded systems, etc.).

We like investing at the seed stage because it allows us to have the greatest impact. We take a founders’ first, no BS approach, and we love to roll up our sleeves and help with strategy, distribution, go-to market, customers, hiring, marketing, and press.

If you’re building an early stage company that meets any of the above criteria, would love to connect > chris@race.capital

Art

I started my artistic work in 2010 with photography, and was the National Geographic Photographer of the Year in 2016 which led to many exhibitions, showings, and commissions in the traditional art world.

Because of this, I was an early creator on many of the NFT platforms, first on Ethereum then on Solana. I learned p5.js to create one of my own generative artworks, Waves, which I launched with Playground in September 2021. Through Playground I now have the privilege of working with other artists launching their first collections on Solana. 

In addition to working with digital artists, I also like to collect these artworks myself and have built up a decent sized NFT collection of my own. 

Previous Work

  • Greylock Partners - I founded and ran the community program at Greylock which included all of our operational centric communities (product, growth, design, security, infrastructure engineering, etc.) and emerging market sectors (VR, AI, Crypto, Robotics, eSports, etc.).

  • StartupDigest - I was the co-founder of StartupDigest. We were one of the early pioneers in tech newsletters and grew our publications to covering 550 cities and 1M subscribers. We were acquired by TechStars in 2012.

  • Thiel Fellowship & StartX - Early advisor and mentor during the first batches for both respective programs.